The aim of Linguistic DNA was to understand the evolution of early modern thought by modelling the semantic and conceptual changes which occurred in English discourse (c.1500-c.1800). The project used information extraction techniques, Big Data computing infrastructure, and data visualisation to identify billions of lexical patterns in 250,000 texts.

Linguistic DNA was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), grant number AH/M00614X/1. The project was a collaboration between English historical linguists at the universities of Sheffield, Glasgow and Sussex, The Digital Humanities Institute and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.